This month OGC marked a major milestone in the history of geospatial
information technology. In a pilot project sponsored by the US federal
government to establish a standards-based architecture on which future
public-sector portal procurements are to be based, OGC members created
and demonstrated an open geospatial portal architecture and a prototype
standards-based, multi-vendor reference portal. Development of the
portal and architecture was heavily subsidized by in-kind contributions
from many software vendors and integrators. The architecture is a
mainstream web-services model for the vendor-neutral geospatial portals
that will soon be the key medium by which people, agencies and
companies publish, find, share and use geospatial information.

Details
of this highly successful project will soon be released in an OGC white
paper entitled: "An OGC Guide to Implementing Standards-Based Portals."
This document will enable both developers and users to build
"open-as-the-Web" distribution and access points for geospatial data
and geospatial Web Services and it will provide data and service
providers with information on how to effectively and efficiently
connect with geospatial portals. OGC's portal pilot project illustrated
beyond doubt that a geospatial portal, entirely within the open spirit
of the web, can be built quickly and collaboratively, using a rich
variety of existing COTS products from a variety of vendors from around
the world -- based on interfaces that implement existing OpenGIS
Specifications.

Using
a browser-based user interface, the portal brought to a distributed
group of map and data servers a new level of discovery (through the
OpenGIS Catalog Services Specification) and access (through the OpenGIS
Web Map Server Specification, Web Coverage Service Specification, Web
Feature Server Specification, Geography Markup Language and others).

OGC's
reference portal and architecture also offer a rich set of tools for
application developers to 1) integrate portal capabilities directly
into their robust GIS applications, and 2) insert geospatial portal
capabilities directly into other existing web sites and portals. These
latter capabilities are ground breaking: for the first time, a
standards-based architecture is effective in facilitating the
integration of services across networks and computing platforms in a
straightforward, understandable fashion.

There
is more, too much to describe here. The important fact is that this
prototype standards-based portal, depending on open interfaces for
communication between many vendors' products, was shown to perform
without a flaw and demonstrated more compatibility, performance and
reliability than any proprietary geospatial portal has yet been able to
demonstrate.

The
OpenGIS Portal Architecture provides a foundation for portals that
enable people to easily do useful things, things reasonable to expect
in the context of the Web: fine-grained searches and varied queries,
looking at maps with lots of information in them, overlaying maps,
letting the computer/network do the computing. These open, scaleable,
configurable geospatial portals will use best-of-breed components (and
also previously stove-piped legacy systems). It will be easy for local
integrators to build local, state, tribal, regional, national,
international and private sector portals that connect easily and
provide tailored access to each other's data services. Web sites that
are not portals will give users access to portal resources, just as
portals direct people (and processes) to remote resources.

One such resource was
demonstrated to the US Census Bureau on June 13. The second pilot
project in OGC's Critical Infrastructure Protection Initiative (CIPI-2)
showed Web-based, vendor-neutral interactive collection and
approval/signing of detailed boundary information, address break
information and base map feature insertion and update. OpenGIS
Specifications provide the foundation for updating Governmental Unit
Boundaries, one of the seven US NSDI Framework Layers, and for updating
and distributing TIGER/GMLä data.

Communities
have developed and maintain their geodata at the local level, and they
have used a variety of data models. This diversity, often unavoidable,
inhibits automated data sharing. OGC is actively prototyping solutions
in conjunction with US government and is working with the W3C (World
Wide Web Consortium) on semantic interoperability issues. OGC's near
term solutions offer local, state and provincial governments
significant opportunity for cost savings: They can simply map from
their models to the national models which are evolving in most nations
through negotiation. Any fields that can't map are then the fields that
must be updated or negotiated. This is a far cry from trying to get the
entire nation of thousands of communities to embrace a single data
content standard!

Portals
provide a vehicle for this. Imagine a pane in a portal's home page
dedicated to data coordination. In that pane there are links to pages
for information communities (transportation, water and sewer, public
safety, etc.). Those pages are forums for reconciling community
information needs. Think about e-Government and data policy as topics
for listservs, blogs, chats and virtual meetings offered through links
on first a few, then hundreds, then thousands of geospatial portals.
Portals are the doorway to progress.

The
key is open standards and interoperability. Together, we build the open
Spatial Web on top of the open Web. We build a major forum for
community reconciliation of data model standards and data policy on a
portal platform built through community reconciliation of spatial
technology interoperability issues.

David Schell, President, OGC

NEWS FROM THE DULLES MEETING

The 46th OGC meetings hosted by Northrop Grumman Information
Technology were held in Dulles, Virginia from June 9th through June
12th. The following were the key votes from these meetings:

1.
The Web Map Context Document (03-036r1) was approved as an Adopted
OpenGIS® Implementation Specification Version 1.0. WM Context allows
for "state" information about a Web Map Service session to be captured,
named, stored, and shared between applications.

2.
The Location Services Interface Package as detailed in the RFC
submission (OGC Document 03-006r1 and 03-007r1) was approved as an
adopted OpenGIS Implementation Specification version 0.0. The LS
Interface Package defines interfaces including those for a Directory
Service (a Yellow Pages used to "find the nearest" or a specific
product or service), Gateway Service (fetches the position of a mobile
device from the network), Geocoder Service (converts a location, such
as a street address to a point with latitude/longitude), Presentation
(Map Portrayal) Service (draws a map), Reverse Geocoder Service
(transforms a given position into a description of a feature location,
such as a street address), and a Route Service (creates a travel
route). The Navigation Service Extension, an enhanced version of the
Route Service is part of the RFC, but contained in a separate document.

3.
The Critical Infrastructure Collaborative Environment (CICE)
Architecture (Documents 03-055, 03-061, 03-062, 03-063) will be
released as a public OGC Discussion Paper. The voluntary efforts of the
CIPI Advisory Committee Architecture working group (AWG) members has
culminated in a series of documents that help to describe the
architecture. These are the CICE Enterprise, Information,
Computational, and Engineering viewpoint specifications. AWG intends to
present these at the upcoming Technical Committee meeting in hopes of
turning them into discussion papers.

4. The document
"Application Objects DIPR" (OGC Document 03-064r1) will be released as
an OGC public Discussion Paper. By way of background, Geospatial
Objects (GO) is an on-going OGC Interoperability Initiative. The states
objectives for GO-1 include the ability to: a) Extend OGC's focus
beyond Web-based Services; Provide for needs of future interoperability
on multiple computing platforms; b) Allow developers to take advantage
of components on any development platform. UML is being used to capture
and express the essence of information and services.

5. The document "XML
Binary Encoding" (03-002r8) will be released as an OGC public
Discussion Paper. The binary-encoding method described in this document
is applicable to all XML documents and not just GML and scientific-data
formats, though many XML documents are not necessarily bulky enough to
benefit greatly from binary encoding. The binary encoding is directly
equivalent to the textual encoding and it is possible to translate any
lone XML document to and from the binary representation with no loss of
information. The binary stream is also parseable and generable
sequentially on-the-fly, as textual XML is, but optional indexing and
direct-random-access capabilities (e.g., of "ID" attributes) are also
available.

EMERGING TECHNOLOGY SUMMIT ENGAGES ATTENDEES

OGC and the Geospatial Industry Technologies Association (GITA)
presented the Emerging Technology Summit (ETS) June 5-6, in Vienna,
Virginia. The goal of this event, part of the organizations' series of
joint programs, was to present the state of the art in spatial Web
Services and to stimulate dialog about related policy issues.

Tim
Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web and Director of the World
Wide Web Consortium (W3C), spoke about the critical importance of
spatial issues and the relationship between the emerging Spatial Web
and Semantic Web. Jim Geringer, former Governor of Wyoming and Past
Chair of the Western Governors' Association and the Education
Commission of the States discussed the role of geospatial Web services
in advancing government and citizen services. These two speakers and
panels of industry experts participated in moderated discussions with
attendees.

UPCOMING INTEROPERABILITY EVENT

The Institute for Defense & Government Advancement will host the
2003 Interoperability conference, a forum for the exchange of ideas on
ways to address interoperability in the US military. This conference
will include high-level discussions from the Services, OSD, Joint
Staff, Combatant Commands, Federal Agencies and Industry on ways to
manage process and systems integration across the Department of Defense
and related federal departments. Sessions will address ways that
interoperability in the information age can create synergy in the DoD
enterprise and increased joint warfighting advantage in the operational
theater.

Two
prototype applications were developed and demonstrated to the U.S.
Census Bureau Geography Division recently by OGC team members Galdos
Systems, Inc. (Canada), Syncline, Inc. (US), and Northrop Grumman
Information Technology, TASC (US). The WebTIGER application allows
those with access to a Web browser to access and download TIGER data
encoded in a vendor neutral format -- Geography Markup Language (GML)
-- an OGC specification for encoding geographic features in XML. The
WebBAS application provides local government users with access to a Web
browser an interactive standards-based capability to report changes to
the boundaries of their governmental units by responding to the
Boundary and Annexation Survey (BAS) online, instead of on paper survey
forms and maps. Anne Satterlee of the City of Fort Pierce, Florida was
the first local tester of the on-line WebBAS application. She found the
system a major improvement over the paper survey and appreciated that
it saves time, is more accurate, and is more responsive to local needs.

Critical Infrastructure Collaborative Environment (CICE)

The
ability to share, integrate and apply information between collaborating
communities for critical infrastructure protection and emergency
response has been a challenge for many years. OGC members voted to
release a document describing the Critical Infrastructure Collaborative
Environment (CICE) Architecture, as noted above. The CICE Architecture
can be downloaded at http://ip.opengeospatial.org/cip/arch.html.

NEW MEMBERS

The Open GIS Consortium welcomes our members who've joined us since May 2003: